Susan Wels is a New York Times-bestselling author, historian, and journalist. Her new book, An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder—a New York Times Editors Choice—is the first book to link the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 to a free-love community in upstate New York. Filled with "rollicking pleasures," according to The New York Times Book Review, "Wels's kaleidoscopic romp is an undeniable thrill." Wels's work has also been praised and published by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, PEOPLE, Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine, the New York Post, Time.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, the San Jose Mercury-News, and The Independent (UK). A graduate of Stanford University in English literature and journalism, she has a master's degree in history from San Francisco State University. She has worked on assignment around the world and served as correspondent on the Titanic Research and Recovery Expedition, reporting daily from the site of the Titanic in the North Atlantic.